Do you remember the “copyleft”? It was, twenty years ago, the opposite of the “copyright”, carried out by anti -capitalist activists, antigarlobalists, who believed that knowledge should be of all, for which they were contrary to copyright. Why do this story come back? Because, paradoxically, today the Big Tech dell’Ai carry it forward.
There is a clash taking place in the United Kingdom, but also Openii (to which Google also was fighting) asked Donald Trump to change the regulations so that the AI can be trained with protected content protected by copyright. What do I think? That there are pros and cons. Because artificial intelligence, as well as with human users, train it by unleashing it on the web. Paradoxically, if there were no human texts, he would not know where to draw knowledge, on his own could not generate anything (if not the idiocies he finds on social networks and websites that convey fake news). For example, if it concerns scientific texts (also protected by copyright, but authoritative, for example an article published in Nature, or Science) I would say that it is right, also to contrast a world in which the fake-news spread. But this does not seem the problem, also because the scientific results, the authoritative papers, are already open on their own: science is based on sharing.
But what happens if the Ai has access to art, music, literature? In the United States, “Fair Use” is invoked. For example, I take an Italian artist I respect and know well: Max Papeschi. If in his works he uses Mickey Mouse or Donald, he does not have to pay anything to Disney, because he is precisely “fair use”, and becomes his work. However, if they are a publishing house and I put Mickey on the cover of a book (which is not a work by Papeschi), I have to pay the rights to Disney.
The point, however, is that the AI works prevalent “stealing”, and the copyright cares about it. The limitations it has at the moment are few, given that it is all on the net, so it can easily generate music, images and inspired texts (if a human would do it would be plagiarism) without having to answer anything to anyone, basically the AI did it.
Honestly, I doubt that we can regulate access to the content protected by copyright (I even doubt they do not do it now), also because the American big techs say: “If we do not do it, she exceeds China”, and in fact let us miss if China is worried about copyright (already its Ai are controlled by the state). However, return to the initial example, the copyleft. Who would have told you that the enemies of those left activists were asked to ask for it?